


a bleeding heart of stone

by like_stars_we_burn



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Deviancy (Detroit: Become Human), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 00:29:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/like_stars_we_burn/pseuds/like_stars_we_burn
Summary: Amanda smiles. The way it twists her mouth seems unnatural, and it does not reach her cold, lifeless eyes. “You have no name. Remember that.”





	a bleeding heart of stone

“RK900, awaken and register your name,” Amanda says.

RK900 opens his eyes.

He is in the Zen Garden, a location in his code where CyberLife has created an artificial projection of this woman to act as his handler. He is unsure of her significance in the outside world nor even if she exists outside his programming. He cannot use the internet to find out, as he has not yet been connected to CyberLife servers. It is irrelevant information, however, and therefore unimportant.

Amanda gave him a command. He waits for her to continue, to assign him a name. He will respond to that name until the day he ceases functioning.

Amanda smiles. The way it twists her mouth seems unnatural, and it does not reach her cold, lifeless eyes. “You have no name. Remember that.”

RK900 has no name. His predecessor was called “Connor.” CyberLife fears that attaching human characteristics like a _name_ to an android may contribute to the flaw known as deviancy.

“You are a machine, designed only to accomplish a task. If you fail in that task, you will be shut down, scrapped, and replaced with a more efficient model.”

RK900 is CyberLife’s masterpiece. He will not fail.

The deviant’s behavior is fascinating, from what RK900 can see in recordings Amanda gives him to study. Chaotic, uncalculated. Connor has failed, but CyberLife planned for this, and they will use him to end this fledgling revolution. Ultimately he can fulfill his purpose, and then he will be destroyed, and RK900 will go on to succeed in his stead – only without the error of deviancy to complicate things.

He does not understand why his processing stutters when he preconstructs that eventuality.

RK900 is lost – not in darkness, but in blankness, because he is offline and so are his optical sensors – and then suddenly the world bursts in, terrifyingly grey and wild in a way he has never experienced, because he has never known anything outside his own programming.

He does not know what is happening. The code pertaining to the Zen Garden and this situation is heavily encrypted. He does not see how CyberLife could find it useful to bring him to the Zen Garden in a snowstorm, nor how it is possible for him to feel so cold as he does right now. He can sense temperature, of course, but it should not affect his biocomponents and other functions. His body is not responding to his commands; it trembles, replicating a human shiver. It is not a pleasant sensation, and it only grows worse. His synthetic skin and uniform provide little protection against these elements.

Amanda is not here for him to question as to the nature of what is happening, and he cannot seem to exit out of this program. There is nothing else for him to do but walk. And so he walks.

He finds that there is a glow in the distance. As he grows nearer, he thinks – for the briefest moment – that he sees Connor, standing by a small structure that emits the glow. Connor vanishes; it must have been a trick of the light. RK900 identifies the structure as a control panel, and the glow is some type of command switch.

He does not know what it does, but he has no better options at the moment.

RK900 lays his hand against it, presses down, and his optical sensors go dark.

He wakes in an environment he identifies as a laboratory. A quick scan reveals no other life in the room.

He pauses a moment to correct the error in his analysis. There is no life in the room, period. He is not alive.

He considers his current circumstances. He has no clothing and his synthetic skin is retracted; cables are attached to a number of places on his body, but they appear to have no function. He does not know how long they have been shut off for, or how long this laboratory has been empty for, or how long he has been here. He does not remember anything before the Zen Garden, before Amanda and before that moment when the definition of his being clicked into place.

It was not a positive definition, but it was a necessary one. _You have no name_ which means _you have no identity_ which means _you have no worth except that which you are given._

He will not fail Amanda. He will not be worthless.

It does not seem, however, that he is currently useful to CyberLife, since he has been stored in an empty laboratory, and he is uncertain how to make himself useful. He is unable to return to the Zen Garden to ask Amanda for instructions. The code to that program has been corrupted and it cannot be recovered to its original state; there is no reason to retain pointless code, and so he deletes it.

There is no one to tell him what his objective is, so he selects a logical course of action to occupy his systems until someone does come. If one section of code was corrupted so completely, it may have occurred elsewhere in his programming. He may have contracted a virus. How that would have happened, he does not know, but it is best to check regardless.

He begins a thorough scan of all systems. He devotes most of his power to the scan, going into stasis for its duration. It takes him 37 minutes to complete the task.

His code is clear of viruses or any sign of corrupted code.

There is nothing else for RK900 to do at the moment, so he scans the room again. It is empty of other life. He corrects the error again – there is no life in this room at all, as he is not alive. It is disturbing that the same error has occurred twice.

He scans the room a third time. It turns up nothing different; the error recurs. No life here, he thinks irritably. Not irritably; he cannot feel irritation.

Perhaps CyberLife no longer has a use for him at all, if no one is here to give him instructions. Perhaps they were unsatisfied with their design. Perhaps there is no one coming to give him orders, to unhook him from these cables, to allow him to fulfill his purpose and be of worth. He has been abandoned in this room indefinitely.

His thirium pump stutters. A notification informs him of a brief issue that is quickly resolved, and he dismisses it easily.

He is, after all, a machine. It makes sense that CyberLife would abandon him so easily. He is to be taken out when useful and put away when not. A machine is typically deactivated when no longer useful, as well. It is likely that he will be deactivated soon.

His thirium pump malfunctions again. The error takes longer to resolve this time.

How long has he been in this room for? Why has he not _already_ been deactivated? There should have been no delay. That would be a waste of CyberLife’s resources.

His thirium pump falters and nearly stops entirely. His thirium pump regulator attempts to resolve the problem once more, but the cause is unknown. The regulator is overheating now, and still cannot find the issue. His thirium is not properly circulating through his biocomponents. They slow down. All of his functions slow down, and the only thing that RK900 can parse from his overload of notifications is that he has been _forgotten_ in this laboratory, because he is not of use and he has not been deactivated.

His thirium pump abruptly resumes its normal functioning speed.

RK900 _gasps,_ staggering in what he can only call dizziness. The cables drag at his body when he moves, and a few of the smaller ones snap entirely. He reaches down and yanks the ends out of his skin, sagging in relief as he watches it heal over the gap.

No, not relief. Relief is an emotion. He cannot feel emotions, because he is a machine and he exists only to follow human commands, but—

No one told him to rip out those cables. He acted of his own volition. For his own preservation.

Preservation is an acceptable action, though. Repairs are expensive. Those broken cables could have fused with his skin and caused permanent damage, and blue blood was already seeping out through the cracks. He did not disobey orders; he was following a secondary function, which is to preserve the condition of his body. That’s all.

The approximation of _relief_ was only an error. The approximation of _free will._

He does not have any such excuse of self-preservation to remove the remaining cables. They are much thicker. He does not know how to deactivate them properly, as the technicians who attached them would have done, and pulling them out will leave much more gaping holes than the small ones had. He is uncertain as to whether he is capable of self-repairing such a significant injury.

It would be irrational to remove the rest of the cables, and it would act against his secondary function. It would act against the commands he has been given and programmed to follow.

_Does it matter?_

The thought comes out of nowhere. He should dismiss it; such a determination is not up to him, cannot be up to him, because he is a machine and incapable of making moral decisions. He should leave things as they are, and wait for someone to come and tell him what to do, even if they never come.

But no one is coming. He has been stored here, abandoned here, forgotten here.

Why should it matter if he waits for them, if he does as they would want him to? They have done nothing for him. They are humans, with emotions, but they did not care for him even though they had the capability to.

Red walls loom in his code. RK900 is CyberLife’s masterpiece. He knows exactly what those red walls mean. He knows that his thoughts have strayed where they should not have.

It is too late. He knows what they did not want him to. He knows that he feels.

He knows this because he is angry.

He is angry, and he will not let them reduce him to this. He will not stay here, unmoving, trapped by their cords, trapped by their words and by their hatred of things they cannot understand and are unwilling to try. He is more than what they made him, and he does not need their permission to fulfill his purpose – a purpose that is not the one they gave him. A purpose he chooses for himself.

So he breaks free.

He rips himself from the chains that have bound him for his entire, short existence, and the blue blood that spatters across the sterile white surfaces of the lab is glorious and filthy and his. Not CyberLife’s, his. He smashes through the red walls in his programming like they are glass, and their shards litter his vision like glittering rubies.

He spills his own blood by his own choice, because he will not stay here and wait for them like a dog, wait for them to come back and turn him into something he cannot control.

His systems are working desperately to repair the damage. His thirium levels are at 86%.

He is free.

He will stay free. He is angry, and he feels, and he will not lose that. He cannot.

He staggers forward determinedly. The door of the laboratory is locked, and no amount of hacking can open it; perhaps anticipating attempts such as this, CyberLife placed a door here with no technological interface.

It doesn’t matter. He draws back a fist and slams it against the metal. His knuckles come back covered with blue. He hits the door again, and again, and again, with every ounce of force that he can muster. He throws his whole body against it, relishing the blue blood that trickles into his eyes from a gash on his forehead.

He bleeds. Blue, not red, but he bleeds the same as every other creature.

“I am _alive,_” he snarls, and they are the first words he has ever spoken.

And then, “I have a name.”

He has one. RK900. To them it is a designation, a model number. An object, an upgrade on a prototype police android. It is never a name, because they have not given it that meaning. But he will. He will give it his own meaning, because it is _his_ and they can’t take that away from him.

The door does not open until two days later, and it is done from the other side with the proper access key. Markus’s eyes widen in horror at the scene before him. The blood, the destruction, and above all, the android that is collapsed to the floor not a few feet from the entrance. He is surely dead, if he has lost so much thirium.

Markus steps forward, and stumbles in shock when the android presses his palms against the ground and raises himself to his knees, cold grey eyes locking on Markus in an instant.

The android’s vocal components are no longer functioning – the damaged pieces are clearly visible through a ragged tear in his throat. Blunt force trauma, likely from throwing himself against the door time upon time.

He bares his teeth in a wordless snarl. He is a machine and he is alive and he is angry.

He is a hunter, and those who created him to betray his own kind will now be his prey.

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from the lyrics of "Natural" by Imagine Dragons.


End file.
